Whiskey Bottles and Brand-New Cars (30 page)

Alan Walden was probably not amused by the jab he got, though; he was left unthanked. Listed among those singled out for “special thanks,” however, was
Phil
Walden, for Jimmy Hall's turn on “Railroad Song” and
“Made in the Shade.” The album was dedicated to Lacy Van Zant, Shorty Medlocke … and Peter Rudge.

The album done, and released on March 24, Kooper bowed out, a very wealthy man. Looking back at the kind of punishment he had just come through, he told them when he left, “I would rather remain your friend than your producer…. We damn near killed each other on this one.” They laughed and hugged and then said good-bye, everyone relieved all around. While Skynyrd were tight with Kooper personally and enjoyed being linked with a cool industry icon, they had clearly come to loathe him as a producer. Billy Powell once said, “We fought all the time. He wanted to be the keyboard player, the producer, the director…. We finally got fed up with it after three albums. That's when we released him.” Ed King agrees but insists that
Skynyrd
had set up the confrontation, for no better reason than that Kooper was “a northerner. They made it a North versus South issue. They just don't like Yankees and [wanted to] make Yankees look like idiots.”

Allen was terse about Kooper. “I'm not saying anything against him,” he said at the time, “but we ain't gonna use him anymore.”

Kooper went on to live la dolce vita in L.A., occupying and getting way too high in a playpen he liked to call the Free Bird Mansion. And he would claim that, while he had beaten MCA, the company had gotten even—not with
him
but with their top-earning act. “Later,” he said, “I found out they charged the million to
Skynyrd's
account!” In time he would also have to deal with the same thing Badfinger had when, a few years later, he would have to come after Polley for royalty payments the manager never made.

Ed King came away from the sessions calling
Nuthin' Fancy
“the best we've done so far,” after the album he called “probably the worst.” As he explained, “The music has changed, but not too much. We're aware of whatever basic element we have that makes us what we are and makes people like us.” But Ronnie wasn't so sure. Having been forced to write songs rather than nurture them along at Hell House and then at clubs, he would lament that the band could not possibly come up with another “Free Bird” on deadline. “We haven't really progressed that much in the past two or three years because we haven't been given the time….
Nuthin' Fancy
was probably our poorest showing.” The culprit, in his estimation, was the “record company putting so much pressure on us…. There were some good spots on it, I thought, but …”

With their tour of the continent a success and another album in the can that was sure to be a hit, they could finally enjoy some income in their pockets, each having received a good-sized royalty check for the quarter and a weekly salary, more like an allowance, of $300, according to King. Even at ten cents a record, big checks were still a ways in the future. Yet “Sweet Home Alabama” had clearly put them on a higher stratum, en route to building their empire—yes, their
empire
, ruled by only one emperor, the one with no shoes.

“One time in Birmingham,” recalled King, who had a bit of a cushion from receiving royalties on “Incense and Peppermints” and who had lived the high life before, “we experienced our first limo ride from the gig back to the hotel. Big time stuff. When we got there, Ronnie demanded the night's take from our road manager, Russ Emerick. Russ told Ronnie he had the money but taxes had to be paid along with other expenses. It still came out to $15,000. Ronnie took the cash and gathered us all in one room. He held the money in his hand peeling off hundreds, saying to each of us, ‘You two played pretty good tonight, you get a thousand bucks each. And you did ok, too … you get a thousand bucks. You did what you were told, that's worth a thousand. You played some good licks … here's a grand.' Then, he said, ‘You'—I won't say who it was but he wasn't talking to me—‘you played like shit. You don't get
nothin'.”
Ronnie paid himself two grand. Lesson learned.”

The lesson was that Skynyrd might have landed in the big time but Van Zant still ran the show. And because he was getting itchy about the money being siphoned before it got to the band, he was about to make a change, one that would give Alan Walden the shock of his life.

P
ete Rudge, a long-faced, motor-mouthed bloke with a big smile and a terrible chain-smoking habit—usually around
sixty
cigarettes a day—seemed to fall deeper in love with Skynyrd every time he heard them. Never much of an American country music fan, Rudge was so smitten with the new idiom in rock that he urged one of his top-shelf bands, the Who, to sprinkle some backwoods influences into their repertoire. His other top band, the Rolling Stones, of course, had already heard the call when they came to record at Muscle Shoals. Pete Townsend would subsequently put some redneck into “Squeeze Box,” the Who's 1975 hit, by adding banjo and accordion parts.

Rudge approached Lynyrd Skynyrd gradually and cautiously but with some urgency after the Who became disenchanted with him due to all the attention he was giving the Stones, prompting Rudge to turn the Who's management over to an assistant and to inveigle himself into the affairs of the country rock band he was taken with. His company, Sir Productions, which certainly sounded more classy than Alan Walden's Hustlers Inc., had an office suite in New York, under the name Premier Talent, on the sixth floor of 130 West Fifty-Seventh Street, right next to Carnegie Hall. Everything about Rudge screamed “big time.” Accordingly, it didn't take much for Ronnie to move in his direction. Indeed, to some in both camps, there was the assumption that Rudge was
already
managing Skynyrd; one of his adjutants at Sir, former British music journalist Chris Charlesworth, believes his boss had taken over the band back in
1973
, during the tour with the Who. In reality, Rudge dearly wanted them but never made a move, figuring they would come to him. And
he was right. He never had to sell himself or bad-mouth Walden, seeing how worked up Ronnie was getting over the paucity of money that was trickling to the band out of the millions they were making MCA.

For his part Walden was quite content with the way things were—not that 30 percent of the band's royalties was getting him much, but his cut of the
publishing
royalties was a growing fortune. He also thought the band should be indebted to him for taking a good portion of their money and investing it, which he believed—correctly—was necessary because, with their backwoods way of divvying up money and spending it indiscriminately, they would lose it all down the line. Whenever anyone in the band asked for some cash, Walden peeled off some bills. But even a doubled royalty rate meant little if the royalties were being siphoned off. None of them could buy a trophy car or move into a spacious crib. They all still lived in apartments in and around Jacksonville, with Ed King and his wife sharing space with Ronnie and Judy at their duplex on Rayford Street, along with Dean Kilpatrick and his girlfriend. Walden hung out there so much it was as if he lived there too, and because he and Skynyrd had come through so much together, never did he think they would ever turn on him.

Walden boasted of their relationship, “We became the Ten Musketeers! All for one and one for all! Wild, crazy, drinking, fighting rednecks with a capital R and proud of it!” While the band wondered where the money was, Walden says now that none was squandered and that Ronnie simply could not understand that, without prudent money management, they'd be out on the street. “I did very career-minded booking while their manager,” Walden says. “I had the long run in mind constantly. I caught a lot of crap from the band sometimes because they wanted to make a certain amount all the time. Once we played a $10,000 date, and they thought all the dates should be $10,000. Well, we might play Nashville for $35,000 and the next day be booked for $3,500 in a market undeveloped. Then another time they said they wouldn't play for less than such-and-such, then they complained of working the same cities over and over.

“Listen, they should have concentrated on the music and the shows and left the bookings and business to the pro. It amazes me how bands hire a manager and as soon as they get hot want to tell him how to do it. Or fire him because he is too smart for them. They should stick to what
they know best.
Music!
And so I was thinking of their latter days when they would no longer tour…. I had set up profit sharing and pension plans for their older years. I got them life insurance. Things they did not want to keep at that time. They wanted it all in
cash
.

“On one of my road trips with them, I discovered $90,000 in a briefcase. I took it home and straight to the bank. I tried to remind them it wasn't that long before that we all had been broke. The wheel of success had turned, and now I was the miser. In their minds, they just knew the success would never stop. It was all going perfectly.
Pronounced
was a hit, and with
Second Helping
moving up the chart, MCA was thrilled and had reps meeting us in every city. Both smash albums were made for under $50,000. No wonder MCA loved us so much. And I was setting them up for the kill. We had not borrowed money, and it was a prime time to renegotiate their recording contract. It would have been a multimillion-dollar deal. We were getting prime concerts now, with the Allman Brothers in Atlanta at Braves Stadium, Clapton in Memphis, ZZ Top in Nashville, and heading to pick off the Eagles at the Orange Bowl in Miami. The band was now the showstopper! They killed and killed. No one could hold up behind ‘Free Bird!'”

Yet it was right then and there, at the Orange Bowl on March 26, 1975, two days after the release of
Nuthin' Fancy
, that the sky fell on Alan Walden.

What Walden didn't know was that Ronnie had gone behind his back and contacted Peter Rudge on his own, a line of communication that Rudge intended to keep open. As Artimus Pyle observes, Rudge was “very manipulative.” While he didn't ask to manage the band, he
did
make sure to say what he would do with them
if
he did: big-time things, worldwide things, things that would spurt big money. And the drip-drip-drip of those conversations filled Ronnie's cup of ambition to the brim. Skynyrd, he became convinced, needed a big-time manager.

He had a point too. Despite Walden's protestations about protecting their long-term security, the band was even then paying out of their own pockets to get to some gigs. When Gary Rossington said in 1977, “We weren't makin' anything, we were just surviving, and we were still having to pay thirty percent to a manager,” it was obvious that they had
come to see Walden not as a Musketeer but as a maggot. “We didn't think anyone would fuck us over, we just thought that if somebody said something, we'd take their word for it, because that's the way we were. We didn't know what kind of rat race this really is. But we started learnin' real quick.”